Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Coach & Cheerleaders: FNL & Dare Me

"There's not a person in the world that could do this except for you. This is what you do. I've seen you do it with my own eyes. I believe in you. I believe in you with every cell of my being." -Tami Taylor (Coach's wife) in "Friday Night Lights" (Eyes Wide Open)

It was a dog on a motorcycle that caught Kathryn Chandler’s eyes. The guy with the dog was Kyle Chandler, star of CBS’ “Early Edition” (which is filmed in Chicago). But back in 1993, there was no “Early Edition.” And Kathryn hadn’t seen Kyle in any of his other roles. All she knew was that any man giving a big dog a ride on his motorcycle was a little eccentric. And she liked that.

“There’s a place in Los Angeles called Dog Park,” says Kathryn. “I would take my little terrier there, and sometimes I’d run into Kyle and his dog. So we would kind of smile at each other and do the triple take, but we wouldn’t really do anything about it. “Then one day I was there on one side of the park with my dog, and he was on the other side. No one else was there. So I said to (my dog) Otis`Go over and jump on that guy.’ And he did! He went over and just pounced on Kyle, who said, `Whoa, friendly dog you got here.’” The two didn’t go out until six months later. “I saw a moving van in front of his house, and I thought, `Ohmigod! It’s never going to happen!’ ” she remembers. “So I took my dog and slowly strolled by his house. I said, `Hey, are you moving?’ And he said his neighbors were.” Then he asked her out to a movie.

Which leads to the question: Why did it take so long for Kyle to ask Kathryn out? She is a former model with an outgoing personality. “I had lots of other girls to ask out first,” he teases. “He’s lying!” she says, laughing. Married since 1995, the couple live in Chicago with their daughter, Sydney. But she says she wants to write an independent film starring a certain shy guy who knows how to ride a mean motorcycle. And by the way, Kathryn still has the ticket stub from “Scent of a Woman” – the movie they went to on their first date. -Chicago Sun Times (Jae-Ha Kim, 1999)

“Welcome, guys” were the words Coach Gary Gaines used to begin the 1988 season. Gary Gaines was a strikingly handsome man with a soft smile and rows of pearly white teeth somehow unstained, as if by divine intervention, from the toxic-looking thumbfuls of tobacco snuff that he snuck between front lip and gum when his wife wasn’t around to catch him. He had beautiful eyes, not quite gray, not quite blue, filled with softness and reassurance. His message was short and sincere: “Nobody rest a play, men. Don’t coast on any play. You’re on that field, you give it everything you got.” They were players like Joe Bob Bizzell, the Golden Boy of golden boys, the one against whom all others were measured. Said one former classmate of him with dreamy reverence as he remembered Joe Bob’s place and time in high school in the early seventies, “You couldn’t touch ’im.” He had been All-State three years, making it as a sophomore, as a junior, and then both ways at receiver and defensive back as a senior. No one else at Permian had ever done that and no one had an instinct for the ball like Joe Bob Bizzell, something that rose beyond a rare gift, a natural talent, and had become a very part of him. “Before they even snapped the ball, I knew what play they were going to run,” he said. “It was weird, but that’s how it was done.” -"Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream" by H. G. Bissinger, H.G. (2004)

"An increasingly addictive noir set in the world of high school cheerleading." (Joe Gross, Austin American-Statesman)

"I’m listening, but I don’t know what I’m hearing. I wonder how many beers Will has had, or if this is what mourning can look like, diffuse and mysterious. “Addy, I think…” He pauses, his beer bottle tilting in his hand. “She knew things I never told anyone,” he says. “Like about my wife. Six years we were together, I never bought her a Valentine’s Day card.” [...] “I felt sorry for Coach. And then when the Sarge died, I felt rotten. I thought maybe Beth used that picture in some evil way. And that Sarge killed himself on account of it. Is that what happened, Addy?”, Tacy says sighing."

"There is Beth at the diamond tip, her face streaked indigo and, from afar, never looking more like the savage princess she is. Seeing her, I feel all kinds of things I can’t name. Her face is so lovely, a perfect spritely smile carved there, lightning bolt tattoo streaked across one high cheekbone. It feels as if we’re on our knees, like prayerful Southern football players... We are all bowing inside, to her. Coach, you’ve not forsaken us. The quiet among us, the devotional silence starts to break apart as we feel ourselves lifted. But not me—me who wants to bathe in the moment’s sacredness forever. The gasp from the bleachers lashes through the air. The force with which she twists her body, spinning it, and then kicking backwards —and all our hands grabbing for her, and the will with which Beth pitches her body, legs kicking so far back. Then the sickening crack and seeing her head click backwards, like a doll’s. But you must see: She never really wanted anything but this." -"Dare Me" (2012) by Megan Abbott